Composer David Lang’s upcoming Stanford Live premiere is a meditation on the world before and after human existence. So why did he title it before and after nature, which seems to be a puzzling inversion of that idea?
The idea of ‘nature’ is a human construct—our ancestors noticed we were apart from the world around us, and then gave that ‘apartness’ its name, its meaning, its value.
And so his title emphasizes human perception as the reference frame within which all of nature unfolds. Without an observer, there’s nothing to say—and worse for a composer, nothing to sing.
Lang graduated from Stanford in 1978, majoring in music after first studying chemistry and pre-med. Now a faculty member at the Yale School of Music, he has won a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy® Award for his 2007 choral work the little match girl passion, and last November the New York Philharmonic awarded him the Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for “extraordinary artistic endeavor in the field of new music.”
The Los Angeles Master Chorale and Bang on a Can All-Stars will premiere before and after nature on February 1 at Bing Concert Hall, after which it will receive further performances at the University of Pennsylvania, the Helsinki Festival in Finland, and Los Angeles’ Disney Hall. The project began with a Stanford Live commission and an open-ended invitation to look around the Stanford campus for ideas. Lang was quickly drawn to the Doerr School of Sustainability, which opened in 2022 as the university’s first new school in 75 years. It incorporates multiple academic areas related to earth sciences and engineering in order to address complex problems related to the environment, climate, energy, food, and water.
“These are topics everyone is talking about right now,” Lang said. “I discovered a mobilization across campus of a huge amount of resources trying to think about these issues. It seemed to me as if the campus was using this idea of sustainability to galvanize attention across disciplines.” He spent a week on campus last April, meeting with scholars, faculty, and students, and visiting the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, which serves as a natural laboratory in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains for researchers from around the world.
Lang was surprised not to hear any clear consensus among experts about what to do.
People do not agree with each other about solutions. Should we have children or not have children? Should we make more energy or less energy? People can’t agree.
This suggested an unresolved human question—one of values and differing, inarticulable feelings—which is exactly where music can step in. Unlike science, “music isn’t about truth, it isn’t about facts, it isn’t about things you can prove,” he said. “It’s about things you feel, how you react, and how we are connected or disconnected by those things.” In the end, the piece became a meditation on our own limitations in seeing and understanding the world.
Lang wrote the text, drawing from various creation myths, as well as writings by John Muir, to help imagine the world before it was divided between humans and nature. He found that many of the myths were built around the idea of negation—that it’s so hard to imagine anything before the world we know, they have to instruct us to imagine the lack of it (“And the earth was formless, and void,” as Genesis says). Turning to the future after humans are gone, Lang wanted to be uplifting, comfortable with the idea of something else inheriting the earth: “when we are gone / the world will end / and then…”
In addition to the LA Master Chorale, before and after nature was written for Bang on a Can All-Stars, the resident ensemble of the Bang on a Can organization, which Lang co-founded in New York in 1987 alongside composers Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon. The six-player lineup looks like something in-between a classical chamber ensemble and a rock band, with clarinet, cello, double bass, electric guitar, percussion and drum set, and keyboard. All are amplified, with a lively and aggressive sound.
At the time of its founding three decades ago, Bang on a Can stood against the largely insular and academic contemporary musical establishment. “It came out of things we wished were different,” Lang recalled. “We wished that young composers had more support. We wished that contemporary music had a larger role in the world. We wished there was an audience different than just the classical music audience or the modernist contemporary audience. We wished that our peers in other creative disciplines would be in our audience. So after talking about it for a long time, we decided to do something.” Bang on a Can now encompasses an eclectic slate of programs, including the multi-day festivals Long Play in Brooklyn and Loud Weekend in Massachusetts, a summer institute for young musicians at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts, and concerts around the world.
The underlying idea is that innovators across disciplines have more in common with each other than they necessarily do with the disciplines they came from. For before and after nature, Lang enlisted the video artist Tal Rosner to create projections as part of the performance. The images combine distorted views of the natural world with computer-generated graphics that nonetheless appear organic, representing the ways in which people alter the natural world just by looking at it.
If sustainability is simply the goal of prolonging an acceptable quality of human existence for as long as possible, then before and after nature defines the boundaries of that mission—perhaps as its prelude and coda. Lang doesn’t offer any environmental prescriptions or solutions, however, nor does he believe that a composer should. “If I knew something specific about how to save the world, it would be criminal of me to say it in music,” he remarked. “I will act on climate change by how I will vote, how I will spend my money, how I will live in my house, how I will teach my children, how I will react to my society politically and socially. Those are things too important to be left to art.”